Incredible RAM use ... never seen such a thing

Installed Opera 11.60 in Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS (dual boot with Vista Basic SP2) yesterday (on a 1Gb Compaq Presario C731TU Notebook with an Intel Celeron 540 1.8GHz Processor) and have come to wish I hadn't. With a mere 4 tabs of Reddit open, and the only desktop effect enabled being Wobbly Windows in Gnome 2.30.2, the whole shebang froze up and 'grey-screened' for nearly a minute. I found (through System Monitor) that it was trying to use 533Mb of RAM! And this is 'improved memory use?'

This has happened several times since installing the new version.

Also, there's a weird 'one-and-a-half icons' thing happening in the top gnome panel when using this version of Opera.

Also, scrolling (whether smooth scrolling is checked or unchecked, doesn't make a difference) is slowing at random. Sometimes it's normal, other times I scroll three or four times and it barely moves a line.

Can someone at least tell me how to roll back to 11.50 in Ubuntu? I've tried downloading the deb package but it says I'm not authorized to open it.

I've been a long time Opera supporter, but the latest version is so hard to work with that, unless I can roll back to the previous version, I'm (very reluctantly) looking at having to go to Chrome until it's all fixed. These memory leaks, BTW, have been plaguing Opera (in Windows and Ubuntu) since at least version 11.

I share your concerns as well. I, too, am sticking with 11.52 until 11.61+ resolves newly introduced issues, or 12.00 final will resolve/revert them.

What happens when you try to manually install the .deb package while in the current directory, like so:

sudo dpkg -i opera_11.52.1100_i386.deb

I am using the promotional package directly from the Linux Mint repository, but the above command works fine on my system, regardless.

Linux Mint 9 LTS, 32bit

Hey, flansuse, thanks for replying!

I used the command you mentioned and managed to downgrade the version, but ended up with:

There was a problem initialising Opera Mail.

Not possible to run old Opera version with new Opera mail files.
AccountManager Init failed

Mail accounts disappeared, gone from panel and greyed-out in Tools menu (Tools > Mail and Chat Accounts).

Ah, well ... back to 11.60 and hoping it'll all be sorted by the time 12 comes out. Thanks anyway.

Originally posted by clean:

There was a problem initialising Opera Mail.

Not possible to run old Opera version with new Opera mail files.
AccountManager Init failed

That actually makes me nervous. I'm glad I only tested Opera 11.6x and 12.0x with a blank profile from the .tar.xz archives.

I opened a thread in Italian subforum concerning Opera high ram-cpu usage...
http://my.opera.com/italiano/forums/topic.dml?id=1221252&t=1325499274&page=1
I have no time to translate the posts (you can use Google Translate) so I will do a summary:
here http://www.tomshw.it/cont/news/google-firefox-vale-1-miliardo-in-tre-anni-soldi-spesi-bene/35118/1.html
under comments, there is a user (AurZero 23/12/2011 07:55) that said:

"Firefox improved a lot the way it uses ram, I keep Firefox opened for 12/15 hours per day with an average of 20/30 tabs and the occupied ram does not go over 300 Mb and the CPU is always on 0-1%, This is sci-fi, until 4 months ago it was an utopy to me to surf the internet using a computer with a first generation Athlon and 512 mb of ram"

So I got curios and I wanted to try. Since I still got opened Opera, I wanted to open another clean, so I choosed Opera-Next. I opened the identical tabs on both Firefox and Opera Next... Wel Opera-Next used 3 times the ram of Firefox! Yes, Opera (Next) has more features, but this does not justify a so high ram usage. Here the screenshot (see Opera-Next, not Opera)

Larger image: http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/7520/parliamone.png

During last period of time I always get my computer swapping because Opera's huge ram usage, this is so annoying, if Opera software will not improve ram usage (like Firefox), in a non definite time, I will be forced to move permanently to Firefox, and I don't want at all to do that, since I am an Opera user (and beta tester) since 7th (maybe 6th) version

Ok I did a mess because Firefox uses another process (plugincontainer) to handle flash and similar plugins, so togheter they use much more ram than Opera, BUT, the Opera's problem is that it does not relase memory at all, even if you clean trashbin of closed tabs